🔍 Search Term Report Mastery: Find Your Best Keywords

The Search Term Report is one of the most powerful — and most underused — reports available to Amazon advertisers. It shows you the exact words and phrases shoppers typed into Amazon before clicking your ad, giving you a direct window into real buyer behavior.

By mastering this report, you can identify which search terms are driving profitable sales, which are draining your budget, and which keywords deserve promotion into your targeted campaigns. The result is smarter spending, better visibility, and higher return on your ad investment.

In this guide, you'll learn how to access the report, how to read it accurately, and how to turn raw data into a repeatable optimization workflow.

A keyword is the term you deliberately bid on inside Amazon Ads. A search term is what a real shopper actually typed. These are not always the same thing — especially when you're using broad or phrase match types. The Search Term Report bridges this gap.

Amazon offers three keyword match types that control how broadly your keyword triggers ads:

Auto-targeting campaigns let Amazon decide which search terms to match your ads to — useful for discovery. Manual targeting campaigns give you full control over which keywords you bid on. The Search Term Report is how you graduate the best performers from auto to manual.

ACoS = Ad Spend ÷ Ad Revenue × 100. It tells you what percentage of attributed sales you spent on advertising. A lower ACoS generally means more efficient spend, though your target ACoS depends on your margins and business goals.

Negative keywords are terms you explicitly exclude from triggering your ads. Adding negatives for irrelevant or unprofitable search terms is one of the fastest ways to stop wasted spend.

Keyword harvesting is the process of finding high-performing search terms in your report and promoting them into manual campaigns as targeted keywords — where you can bid on them precisely and intentionally.

Log in to Amazon Seller Central and navigate to Reports > Advertising Reports. Select Search Term as the report type. Choose your desired date range — a minimum of 30 days is recommended to capture enough data for reliable decision-making. Download the report as a CSV file.

💡 Pro Tip: Use a 60–90 day date range when you're mining for keyword patterns or building a new manual campaign. Shorter windows can miss seasonally relevant terms or low-frequency converters.

Open the CSV and familiarize yourself with the columns that drive decisions. Focus on these:

Before filtering data, add two calculated columns to your spreadsheet:

Then apply filters to every column so you can sort and segment the data quickly. This is your working analysis layer — don't modify the raw data tab.

💡 Pro Tip: Create a second tab called "Analysis" and paste values-only from the raw data. This protects your source data while giving you a clean workspace to sort, filter, and color-code.

Sort by Sales (highest to lowest), then apply a filter to show only rows where Orders ≥ 1. These are your proven converters — real shoppers bought your product after searching for these terms.

Next, filter for search terms where:

These terms are your harvest candidates — ideal for promotion into exact match keywords in a manual campaign.

Sort by Spend (highest to lowest) and filter for rows where Orders = 0. These are search terms that consumed budget without generating a single sale.

Within this group, prioritize for negative keywords any search terms that:

💡 Pro Tip: Don't add negatives after just 1–2 clicks. Low click counts don't give statistically meaningful data. Set a threshold — typically 5–10 clicks with zero orders — before negating a term.

These are the trickiest category — search terms with significant clicks but an ACoS well above your target or very few orders. Don't automatically negate them.

Ask:

For each top-performing search term you identified in Step 4, take the following action:

💡 Pro Tip: Create a separate manual campaign specifically for harvested keywords — for example, named "Manual – Exact – Harvested Terms". This keeps your campaign structure clean and makes future audits easier.

Go back to Amazon Ads > Campaign Manager and open the campaigns where the wasted spend terms were identified. Navigate to the Negative Keywords tab at either the campaign or ad group level.

Search term analysis is not a one-time event. Establish a recurring schedule:

💡 Pro Tip: Keep a running Negative Keyword Master List in a separate spreadsheet. Before launching any new campaign, apply this list at the start — it saves hours of cleanup later.

Seller profile: New seller, 3 months on Amazon, running one auto-targeting Sponsored Products campaign for a bamboo cutting board.

The problem: The seller was spending $400/month on ads with a 55% ACoS — well above their 30% target. They assumed the product wasn't competitive enough.

Action taken: Downloaded their first Search Term Report and discovered that 80% of their spend was going to loosely matched terms like "bamboo furniture," "bamboo plant," and "bamboo flooring" — all completely irrelevant. Meanwhile, three search terms — "bamboo cutting board large," "bamboo chopping board with juice groove," and "wood cutting board bamboo" — had generated 11 orders at a 22% ACoS.

Result: Added 15 negative exact keywords to block irrelevant traffic. Harvested the three high-converting terms into a new exact match manual campaign. Within 30 days, overall ACoS dropped to 28% and total orders increased by 40% with the same monthly budget.

Seller profile: Multi-ASIN seller with 12 active Sponsored Products campaigns across two product categories.

The problem: Campaigns had grown organically over 18 months with no structured harvesting system. Keywords were scattered across campaigns with overlapping targeting, causing internal competition and inflated CPCs.

Action taken: Pulled a 90-day Search Term Report for all campaigns. Built a consolidated analysis tab segmenting terms by ACoS tier: under 20%, 20–35%, 35–50%, and over 50%. Harvested the top 40 exact match performers into a single structured manual campaign per product line. Added 60 negative keywords across auto campaigns to stop internal competition.

Result: Reduced average CPC by 18% across the account within 60 days by eliminating internal keyword cannibalization. Overall account ACoS improved from 41% to 31%, freeing budget to scale top-performing ASINs.

Why sellers make this mistake: It feels logical to look at recent data — "what's happening right now." But a 7-day or 14-day window captures too little data to make statistically reliable decisions. Low-volume keywords may show zero orders purely because not enough impressions have accumulated.

What to do instead: Use a minimum of 30 days for routine reviews and 60–90 days for deep harvesting sessions. More data = more reliable signals.

Why sellers make this mistake: Seeing a search term with no conversions triggers an impulse to cut it immediately. But a term with only 1–3 clicks has barely been tested.

What to do instead: Establish a click threshold (typically 5–10 clicks) before negating any term. For high-ticket products where conversion rates are naturally lower, raise that threshold further.

Why sellers make this mistake: Sellers add a high-performing search term to a manual campaign but forget to exclude it from the auto campaign where it was discovered. Both campaigns then compete for the same traffic, driving up your own CPC.

What to do instead: Every time you harvest a search term into an exact match manual campaign, immediately add it as a negative exact keyword in the originating auto or broad match campaign.

Why sellers make this mistake: The report shows the search term — but the Targeting column shows which keyword triggered it. Sellers often fix the symptom (the search term) without diagnosing the cause (a broad match keyword that's too loose).

What to do instead: Always check the Targeting column alongside the search term. If one broad match keyword is triggering dozens of irrelevant search terms, tighten it to phrase or exact match rather than adding an endless list of negatives.

Why sellers make this mistake: ACoS-first thinking leads to cutting any term that hasn't converted yet. But some high-value, high-intent terms simply need more time or budget to accumulate orders.

What to do instead: Factor in relevance and impression volume before negating. A highly relevant term with 200 impressions, a strong CTR, but only 3 clicks needs more traffic — not elimination.

When you apply the Search Term Report workflow consistently, here's what you can expect over time:

Most sellers who implement a consistent 30-day review cycle see measurable ACoS improvement within 60–90 days, with compounding benefits as the keyword portfolio matures.

For active campaigns, a bi-weekly review is a practical starting point. Do a quick negative keyword pass weekly if your daily ad spend is high (over $50/day). A full harvest and restructuring session can be done monthly or quarterly depending on how aggressively you're scaling.

Yes. The Search Term Report is available for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns. Sponsored Display uses different targeting mechanics (audiences and product targeting) and has its own reporting structure. The workflow described in this article applies most directly to Sponsored Products.

Your target ACoS should reflect your break-even ACoS — calculated from your product margin after COGS, FBA fees, and referral fees. For example, if your net margin before advertising is 35%, your break-even ACoS is 35%. Below that, the ad is profitable. Many sellers also set a target ACoS lower than break-even to ensure a profit buffer. There is no universal "good" ACoS — it's always relative to your margin.

Yes. Any campaign using a non-exact match type — auto-targeting, broad match, or phrase match — will generate a Search Term Report with discoverable converting terms. Auto campaigns are especially valuable for discovery. Broad and phrase match campaigns can also surface variants worth promoting to exact match for tighter bid control.

Sort by Sales descending, then filter for terms with the lowest ACoS and highest order count. Prioritize the top 20–30 terms that meet your ACoS target and have at least 2–3 orders. These are your highest-confidence candidates. Work through the list systematically over time rather than trying to harvest everything at once.